201–210 of 346 posts
On my mainstream media outlet of choice, I’m pretty sure there has been a front page headline about the derailment at least half of the days since it occurred. This “quietly” “they don’t want you to know” meme is just bullshit superiority cynicism and/or clickbait.
I'm guessing they didn't.
This is going to sound exceptionally crass… But as somebody who’s from the outright poorest part of Ohio, with generations of coal workers in the family… I’m sitting here, in the West Coast sun, laughing about this. I’ve also spent significant amounts of time in the general region of this disaster It’s awful. The situation is absolutely awful, that town & everything in a radius around it is genuinely fucked, and from…
"I’m sitting here, in the West Coast sun, laughing about this. " Myself, I'll try not to laugh when millions of people stupid enough to live on the San Andreas fault line relocate into the ocean overnight. Out of a misplaced sense of unrequited empathy.
I’m currently living the life of an absolute pauper on the West Coast - I could have magnitudes of a much nicer living back home
But, You can’t reason with unreasonable people, which is what the majority of rural Ohio is. So why would I want to continue to live amongst their unrelenting self-inflicted misery?
I can’t control the fault lines in the West, as the Indians whose remains were buried in mounds around my home property couldn’t control the invading & murderous Europeans.
But - my peers, to at least some degree, could control who they vote into representation that make decisions regarding these disastrous policies that lead to a near literal salting of our earth. And they’ve always chose the worst people, mostly for nefarious or hateful reasons (if you disagree with this statement, and you didn’t spend decades of your life growing up amongst these folk - you’re arguing something you’re ignorant of)
If I could vote, on the West Coast, to send aid for these environmental catastrophes in the MidWest from either our state funds in the form of $, or just in skilled recovery workers - I would. The majority of those I’ve found to be my peers would as well, as would many of the neighbors I don’t have much acquaintance with - their public voting records tell enough.
I can however tell you with near certainty those I grew up around would not vote to assist the West Coast when we eventually have our big quake.
If you want to speak of empathy, feel free to start there.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bhopal was probably an order of magnitude 'worse' than this.
At least two.
Say two people were to eventually die here. Bhopal: 20,000. That's literally 4 orders of magnitude worse. And nobody has died or been seriously injured yet, so even that is premature.
Being chicken-little is not helpful. The next stage is being "boy who cried wolf". OP: Let's keep things in at least a little balance.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Have there been hundreds of stories about this? Chinese balloons are novel. This is not. It’s tragic. But its most memorable element seems to be the meta-debate around its coverage. That's boring.
I think the people in Ohio wondering if they're going to be in a Flint-like situation, WTF these chemicals the average person has never heard of are, and what's going to be done about it are all interesting subjects. Alas, I haven't heard much about them from those knowledgeable enough to chime in on the subjects and I'd love to. As for balloons, they got boring last week, other than some airspace closures that only…
It’s a diplomatic escalation with global geopolitical ramifications. If you have any business or personal exposure to China, or anything in Southeast Asia, that’s directly relevant in a way lives in Ohio, unfortunately, are not.
Also, Ohio is out of immediate crisis. Now is the time for investigation and litigation. The train has derailed. Yet balloons may keep coming—that’s the drama one story has that the other lacks.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fox has reports on it from a few days ago too: https://www.foxbusiness.com/lifestyle/ohio-mayor-norfolk-sou... It's more likely that nobody really cared about this until it went viral on Twitter and TikTok, when people felt a social obligation to show support. It's not bad to recognize the issue, but our willingness to shoot the messenger has prevented us from being able to learn anything in the first place. How many…
Thanks for the reply! May I ask why "you don't care", though?
A thread from Mastodon, with a few pictures: https://oldbytes.space/@swordsjew@mstdn.social/1098487070662...
> The local police blew it up like a beached whale, now megatoxins are Chernobyling Ohio and there's a news blackout and the police are beating reporters and camera people and dragging em This is simply a set of lies.
https://www.wkyc.com/article/news/local/ohio/reporter-arrest...
https://www.cbsnews.com/pittsburgh/news/reporter-arrested-du...
etc.
I'm sure, of course, that the police reaction had nothing whatsoever to do with his ethnicity. /s
Does the NTSB look into train derailments? Would be interesting to see whether the systems engineering for trains hauling large quantities of industrial chemicals is on par with that of airlines. If not, it probably should be.
There are defect detectors on rail lines, "hot box" detectors [1] [2], that are infrared detectors used to observe and report bearing failures on a train. My understanding of the situation is that with the current rail labor configuration, railroad workers are only permitted ~90 seconds to verify the operational capacity of the wheelset on a rail car vs a previous average of 3 minutes. Also, more importantly, someone…
https://abcnews.go.com/US/toxic-chemicals-train-derailed-ohi... (There were more toxic chemicals on train that derailed in Ohio than originally reported, data shows)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If you were to tally up how much airtime each news story gets, plotted against the general tone of the coverage, you'd probably come up with something resembling the news room agenda It's not like it's subtle. There have been hundreds of Chinese weather balloon stories in the past week. Have there been hundreds of stories about this? US companies make money from stories about Chinese weather balloons. They lose mon…
> Have there been hundreds of stories about this? Chinese balloons are novel. This is not. It’s tragic. But its most memorable element seems to be the meta-debate around its coverage. That's boring.
With the balloons you have someone to point to and pin the blame who is not you.
With derailments and the recent acrimonious railworker labor agreement still in the rearview, the blame can't be cast far away; so the play is to ignore it and hope it fades.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I searched for this. There are 4 pieces in the NYTimes alone. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/04/us/train-derailment-fire-... https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/100000008756189/ohio-train-... https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/06/us/ohio-derailment-chemic... https://www.nytimes.com/article/ohio-train-derailment.html?s...
So people keep pointing to NYTimes stories, but I go on the Time's site at least 2-3 times daily, spread throughout the day, and I still have not seen a single story on the Time's main page. I'm not going to call it "front page" now because there are around ~130 stories there. Not one of those 130 stories there currently cover this. Ctr-F "train", "Ohio", "Palestine" etc. In those 130 articles there are the Wirecutte…
I got to know, do the pro nuclear crowd really want to live down wind of a nuclear power plant when they will be run by the same business processes and deregulation that lead to this disaster, Fukushima, the BP oil rig disaster, etc?
I think something like 20% of electricity in the US currently comes from nuclear. It's an extremely safe source of power - proven out over decades. So, yes, it's perfectly safe to live near a nuclear power plant.